Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Synapse
/ˈsaɪnæps/noun
The junction across which a nerve impulse passes from one neuron to the next.
The Greek roots
σύν
sýn
together, with
ἅπτειν
háptein
to fasten, join
Literally: “a fastening together”
The story of the word
Charles Sherrington needed a name in 1897 for the gap he could not see but could infer from how signals behaved, and a classicist colleague supplied the Greek. The first suggestion was syndesm, which Sherrington rejected as ugly. The same verb ἅπτειν gives haptic, the sense of touch, so the word for a nerve contact and the word for a phone's vibration share a root.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1897
Same family
hapticsynapsissynthesis
In a sentence
Learning a scale on the piano rewires synapses, not muscles.